tinygrad supports various runtimes, enabling your code to scale across a wide range of devices. The default runtime can be automatically selected based on the available hardware, or you can force a specific runtime to be default using environment variables (e.g., CPU=1).
| Runtime | Description | Requirements |
|---|---|---|
| NV | Provides acceleration for NVIDIA GPUs | Ampere/Ada series GPUs |
| AMD | Provides acceleration for AMD GPUs | RDNA2/RDNA3 series GPUs |
| QCOM | Provides acceleration for QCOM GPUs | 6xx series GPUs |
| METAL | Utilizes Metal for acceleration on Apple devices | M1+ Macs; Metal 3.0+ for bfloat support |
| CUDA | Utilizes CUDA for acceleration on NVIDIA GPUs | NVIDIA GPU with CUDA support |
| GPU (OpenCL) | Accelerates computations using OpenCL on GPUs | OpenCL 2.0 compatible device |
| CPU (C Code) | Runs on CPU using the clang compiler | clang compiler in system PATH |
| LLVM (LLVM IR) | Runs on CPU using the LLVM compiler infrastructure | llvm libraries installed and findable |
| WEBGPU | Runs on GPU using the Dawn WebGPU engine (used in Google Chrome) | Dawn library installed and findable. Download binaries here. |
tinygrad provides interoperability with OpenCL and PyTorch, allowing efficient tensor data sharing between frameworks through the Tensor.from_blob API. This enables zero-copy operations by working directly with external memory pointers.
Important: When using external memory pointers with tinygrad tensors, you must ensure these pointers remain valid throughout the entire lifetime of the tinygrad tensor to prevent memory corruption.
You can seamlessly work with CUDA/MPS tensors between PyTorch and tinygrad without data copying:
from tinygrad.dtype import _from_torch_dtype
tensor1 = torch.tensor([1.0, 2.0, 3.0], device=torch.device("cuda"))
tiny_tensor1 = Tensor.from_blob(tensor1.data_ptr(), tensor1.shape, dtype=_from_torch_dtype(tensor1.dtype), device='CUDA')
# Before tinygrad calculations, mps needs to be synchronized to make sure data is valid.
if data.device.type == "mps": torch.mps.synchronize()
else: torch.cuda.synchronize()
x = (tiny_tensor1 + 1).realize()tinygrad supports OpenCL interoperability on QCOM backend.
Buffer interop allows direct access to OpenCL memory buffers:
# create raw opencl buffer.
cl_buf = cl.clCreateBuffer(cl_context, cl.CL_MEM_READ_WRITE, 0x100, None, status := ctypes.c_int32())
# extract pointers
cl_buf_desc_ptr = to_mv(ctypes.addressof(cl_buf), 8).cast('Q')[0]
rawbuf_ptr = to_mv(cl_buf_desc_ptr, 0x100).cast('Q')[20] # offset 0xA0 is a raw gpu pointer.
# create tiny tensor
tiny = Tensor.from_blob(rawbuf_ptr, (8, 8), dtype=dtypes.int, device='QCOM')And the same for the images:
# create cl image.
cl_img = cl.clCreateImage2D(cl_context, cl.CL_MEM_READ_WRITE, cl.cl_image_format(cl.CL_RGBA, cl.CL_FLOAT), w, h, 0, None, status := ctypes.c_int32())
# extract pointers
cl_buf_desc_ptr = to_mv(ctypes.addressof(cl_img), 8).cast('Q')[0]
rawbuf_ptr = to_mv(cl_buf_desc_ptr, 0x100).cast('Q')[20] # offset 0xA0 is a raw gpu pointer.
# create tiny tensor
tiny = Tensor.from_blob(rawbuf_ptr, (h*w*4,), dtype=dtypes.imagef((h,w)), device='QCOM')